“The trouble with tribbles”: email and digital literacy

The use of email, long called the “killer app” of the Internet, has had a profound impact on almost all other forms of writing in the 30 years it has been with us. Because email is multi-modal (Kress 2003), combining the genre of the print memo with the mixed register of both spoken and written discourse (Baron 2003; Ong 1982), and because of the effects of speed, reach, and lack of hierarchy that are built into the Internet (Gurak 2003), email has become the de facto form of communication in our time. Yet the lack of social cues (Hiltz and Turoff 1978, 1993) and the mixed genre and informal register used for most email is not appropriate for the kinds of writing needed to be successful in college and in the workplace. Further, the fact that email spawns more email and that digital information never really disappears means that what is said in an off-the-cuff manner may come home to roost years later. This paper follows a short case of an email communication, using simple linguistic and rhetorical analysis, to illustrate “the trouble with tribbles”: how messages duplicate, spawn new messages, travel widely, and in the end lead to more confusion than understanding, in part because the genre conventions of email seem to drive the conversation, not the other way around. I will ask the audience to help think up new “rules of the road” for email based on this analysis.

“. . .  a space trader, Cyrano Jones, gives Uhura a purring ball of fluff known as a tribble. Charmed by the creature, Uhura takes it back to the Enterprise. However, as McCoy soon learns, tribbles are born pregnant and the more they eat ... and they eat constantly ... the more they multiply. Soon the starship is overrun by the furry creatures.”

From a very famous episode of Star Trek.   © 2006 CBS Studios Inc. Used under fair use guidelines for educational purposes and commentary/criticism.

About the Author

Laura J. Gurak is a nationally recognized scholar in rhetoric,
writing, and Internet research. She is Professor and Head in the
Rhetoric Department at the University of Minnesota. She received her
Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1994. Gurak is author
of Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet with Awareness (Yale 2001)
and Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests over
Lotus MarketPlace and the Clipper Chip (Yale 1997). Persuasion and
Privacy was the first book-length study to document the dynamics of
online social actions and protests. Gurak has also authored three
textbooks and edited three collections, including the jointly produced
Into the Blogosphere (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/).